I liked the variety and sheer volume of content on the other one, but I have had a lot less of those horrible interactions on Lemmy. I kind of like it being small town.

Do we want it to grow to the size of traditional social media?

I want people here, not US politicians, the Pringles social media account and three bots.

Yes and no. It's more I want the big socials to have competition and shrink

No. I'm much more technology-literate than the average person, and while I appreciate the advantages of federation it annoys even me a lot of times.

Also, Lemmy is much further left than the average population and even reddit. So either it won't grow to mainstream size because of that, or it will and the demographic will shift more to the center which will be off-putting to the original users.

No, but it is foolish to want such a thing.

More people == More problems.

The best thing about Reddit was the people... Until it got too many of them motherfuckers.

It's possible, but I don't hope for it. There are tradeoffs for everything. The more the population expands, the more content, yes, but the number of negative encounters goes up too.

I'm good with where it's at now, but do recognize that I'm not necessarily average because I don't stay on my phone for extended periods.

Considering piefed launched a bunch of people went there... No I don't think so.

Could the fediverse? Yes I hope!

Realistic? Yes. Especially since Reddit is going far down the fascist rabbit hole gargling those Trump balls while allowing power tripping mods to dictate everything.

Desired? No. As the bigger Lemmy gets, the more likely enshittification will happen.

If it becomes like the others, I'll just move on again.

I like how left Lemmy is and, as a result there's a lot less dickheads.

...apart from me of course

Don't put that evil on me Ricky Bobby

Be careful what you wish for.

I don't know that I'd call it a hope personally: Any place that gets really big starts to get shitty too (see Digg, Reddit, etc.) . Federated stuff might be more resistant to the effects, but it is not completely immune.

That said, I think the Fediverse in general stands a chance to really take off with the general public, it may or may not be Lemmy that is the platform that does it.

About 5 million people is good. I was on Digg as it grew and became shit. I was on reddit as it grew and then became shit. Once the active user base goes over ten or fifteen million people, things start going down hill. Advertisers and bots and mods that can't keep up and too much outside press and governments mentioning the platform with unwanted attention.

Right now things are OK for general news and info, but not big enough for more unique communities. Like I can't go to a community within lemmy to find another thousand+ people all about yo-yo's, but reddit has r\throwers with over 40k subscribers so I can go this "stout guy" show me how to do a new trick.

No, because it takes slightly more effort to understand and interact with than centralized social media without the firehouse of content.

Lemmy has many heads. Each server can be about anything and with its own rules. So I think yeah. I've been on various servers for several years now, maybe 3 or 4?

I don’t think so. The barrier to entry is pretty low but the average internet user still can’t get over it, so I don’t think it will ever become mainstream.

No more unrealistic than the massive valuations on the stock market of social media corporations that can supposedly back it up somehow (with AI! or something... VR maybe?) despite the fact that fundamentally these social media places are becoming crowded rooms full of bots pretending to be humans all trying to manipulate humans who are long gone.

My point is, we will figure out how to sustainably scale before corporations do because the metabolism of massive tech companies precludes them from giving a shit about that.

At this point, inefficiency is a virtue for these corporations as it degrades the environment around them making future alternatives unlikely to be able to gain a hold in such a broken context.

I think that depends on your time horizon.
In the next 5 years? No, not realistic.
In the next 50? Nearly certain I expect.
15-20 years? Maybe?

It's not an equal comparison because there isn't a single Lemmy. And I say that from a non-Lemmy account (Mbin), furthering the point. Most people from the Reddit migration probably came here because of the decentralization factor. Think of Lemmy and the rest as subreddits but without the domination of the main site. The best any community (subreddit) can do is defederate other groups (prevent their content from being seen in their own instance) that they see as problematic, but that's all that's needed.

Imagine the Fediverse structure, but there was a single controller that any instance had to go through to filter external content, and had to obey when told to filter external content. It's a new Reddit. The freedom for anyone to set up instances with whatever content or filtering they want makes it totally different. But to the point asked, that's why you can't talk about Lemmy in a singular manner, it's not one thing. And that's good.

I wish decentralized platforms could be the future, but realistically, corporations hold the power and the momentum, and they will do everything they can to keep it that way. Even when one platform does enshittify too hard and die, users will go to the next corporate platform with the biggest advertising budget.

Still, I'll do what I can to help build this corner up for those who want to try.

It would be good I think but it would mean server hosting requirements would skyrocket or small instances would need to really think about which instances to network with.

Maybe not, but I quite like how there's quality over quantity on Lemmy, sure Reddit is bigger but it seems like discussions are less in depth there. feels like with each Lemmy thread I can pick out several users who I kinda know lol and I like that